The Persian poet Rumi once said that “the wound is the place where the light gets in.” Musician Leonard Cohen meant much the same in his Anthem lyrics: Ring the bells that still can ring, Forget your perfect offering, There’s a crack, a crack in everything, That’s how the light gets in. The moment we fall...

There is a scene in the movie Shrek where the limbs of the Gingerbread Man are being pulled off one by one. I felt very much like that at one point during my second pilgrimage, the time after Spain. Significant brain fog prevented me from formulating coherent sentences to be read by the public. Writing...

About once a week I hear the same question from a reader, “What keeps you going?” The short answer is lots of things. I use a variety of tools to persevere through my struggle with depression because what works on one day doesn’t the next. I have to break some hours into 15-minute intervals and...

Shortly after the death of Robin Williams I wrote a post called What I Wish People Knew About Depression. It was a small effort to chip away at the stigma associated with depression and to raise awareness of the complexities inherent to mood disorders. I have expounded on those statements here and rearranged them to read...

I sprouted early as a kid. In the fourth grade, I towered over many of my classmates, and especially over my two best friends. Lining up for school processions, they gathered at the beginning of the line, while I was the second or third person from the last. I recall one Saturday afternoon coming back...